Thus, to my mind at least, the _Subterranean Inhabitants_ of Mr. Kirk’s book are not so much a traditional recollection of a real dwarfish race living underground (a hypothesis of Sir Walter Scott’s), as a lingering memory of the Chthonian beings, “the Ancestors.” A good case in point is that of Bessie Dunlop, of Dalry, in Ayrshire, tried on 8th November 1576 for witchcraft. She dealt in medicine and white magic, and obtained her prescriptions from Thomas Reid, slain at Pinkie fight (1547), who often appeared to her, and tried to lead her off to Fairyland. She, like Alison Pearson, was “convict and burnt” (Scott’s _Demonology_, p. 146, and Pitcairn’s _Criminal Trials_). Both ladies knew the Fairy Queen, and Alison Pearson beheld Maitland of Lethington, and Buccleugh, in Fairyland, as is recounted in a rhymed satire on Archbishop Adamson (Dalzell’s _Scottish Poems_, p. 321). These are excellent proofs that Fairyland was a kind of Hades, or home of the dead. Mr. Kirk, who speaks of the _Sleagh Maith_ as confidently as if he were discussing the habits of some remote race which he has visited, credits them, as the Greek gods were credited, with the power of nourishing themselves on some fine essential part of human sacrifice, of human food, “some fine spirituous Liquors, that peirce like pure Air and Oil, on the poyson or substance of Corns and Liquors.” Others, more gross, steal the actual grain, “as do Crowes and Mice.” They are heard hammering in the howes: as Brownies they enter houses and cleanse the hearths. They are the Domovoys, as the Russians call them. John Major, in his exposition of St. Matthew (1518, fol. xlviii.), gives perhaps the oldest account of Brownies, in a believing temper. Major styles them Fauni or _brobne_. They thrash as much grain in one night as twenty men could do. They throw stones about among people sitting by the fire. Whether they can predict future events is doubtful (see Mr. Constable in Major’s _Greater Britain_, p. xxx. Edinburgh, 1892). To us they seem not much remote from the Roman Lares—spirits of the household, of the hearth. In all these creatures Mr. Kirk recognises “an abstruse People,” who were before our more substantial race, whose furrows are still to be seen on the hill-tops. They never were, to his mind, plain palpable folk; they are only visible, in their quarterly flittings, to men of the second sight. That gift of vision includes not only power to see distant or future events, but the viewless forms of air. To shun the flittings, men visit church on the first Sunday of the quarter: then they will be hallowed against elf-shots, “these Arrows that fly in the dark.” As is well known, superstition explained the Neolithic arrow-heads as Fairy weapons; it does not follow that a tradition of a Neolithic people suggested the belief in Fairies. But we cannot deny absolutely that some such memory of an earlier race, a shy and fugitive people who used weapons of stone, may conceivably play its